This year's book news has produced the usual questions about "how many books is this one for Loren Coleman." Let's begin at the beginning, in the third person.

Books are merely a window to a very strange world.

After discovering cryptozoology in March 1960, and spending years doing fieldwork, Loren Coleman at 20, wrote his first published article.

During the second half of 1975, Loren Coleman's first book was published by Warner Books, when he was 27. He was in the process, in August of that year, of moving from California to New England. He found the first copy of his first book on the shelves of a bookstore in the Midwest, even before he was able to receive a copy from his New York publisher.

In Boston, Coleman would extend his anthropological and zoological education, gained at Southern Illinois University, into the realm of the psychological understandings of humans. From Bucky Fuller at SIU, to studying under Sophia Freud at Simmons School of Social Work and doing incomplete doctoral work at Brandeis University and University of New Hampshire, Coleman explored many topics that interested him. He would teach at six universities in his career, before consulting and then opening the International Cryptozoology Museum in 2003 in Portland, Maine..

Since 1975 to present, Coleman has written, edited, and contributed to many other books, as primary author, coauthor, editor, or contributor. But how many books does this involve, in total? How many books has Coleman "written"?

One can do a search on Google or Yahoo, and you will find the weaknesses of information overload and disorganization on the web revealed. You can discover all kinds of answers on the Internet to the question of "how many": seven, seventeen, and over thirty are the usual biographical and bibliographical talking points. But what is the number and names of Loren Coleman books, actually?

"How many" depends directly on how one wishes to count the many tomes, editions, revisions, series, and other products of Loren Coleman's book-length writings.

So, let's join in taking a literary journey. What follows is a comprehensive listing of the nonfiction books of cryptozoologist and social scientist Loren Coleman (not to be confused with the younger Loren L. Coleman who writes science fiction).

Below you will discover, in chronological order from most recent to earliest, the authored and coauthored editions, and various other forms of contributions (shown in "quotation marks" after the book title) of Loren Coleman's output in book form.

How do books change over time? The Paraview Pocket - Simon and Schuster edition (seen directly above) of Mysterious America appeared in 2007 and is a good case to examine.

Since first appearing in 1983, the entire original book has been rewritten, internally, often. New chapters have been added, some retained but expanded, and the actual text has been changed by 50%.

In the 1983 edition, for example, the two mystery cat chapters totaled just 23 pages. In the 2007 edition, there are now over 60 pages of text in those two cryptid feline chapters alone, plus the new detailed listings of Eastern and Western North American mystery cat sightings as appendices. In the 1983 volume, there was no index, and in 2007, you'll find about 275 people (from Arment to Zarzynski), places (from Abington, IN to Yakin County, SC), cryptids and other items in small print over the eight pages of the new index.

Down through the years, the 1983, 1989, 2001, and 2007 editions appear to be different books because they actually are, inside and out, with new covers and greatly changed contents, even though various publishers kept the essence of the best-selling classic title in intact for identification and marketing reasons.

[Most important creation this year: Malcolm is born on February 11, 1986.]

1984.

The Sasquatch and Other Unknown Hominoids "From Atshen to Giants," (with Mark A. Hall) and "The Occurrence of Wild Apes in North America." Calgary: University of Calgary, 1984. Vladimir Markotic and Grover Krantz (eds.)

The Book of Lists #3. "Nine Large Animals Discovered by Western Science Since 1900," and "Eight Worst Monster Hoaxes." New York: William Morrow, 1984. Anne Wallace, David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace (eds.)